“My earliest direct contact with painting was . . . as a ten-year-old student at the Cleveland Museum. The specific painting that made an impression was Ryder’s ‘Death Riding the Race Track.’ My early attraction to that macabre composition suggests a natural propensity to a romantic perception of reality.... In addition to this, in later years I have come to realize... (http://www.michaelrosenfeldart.com/artists/hughie-lee-smith-1915-1999) Many years after winning a top prize for painting from the Detroit Institute of Arts in 1953, he recalled "I was no longer called black artist, Negro artist, colored boy. When I won that prize, all of a sudden, there was no longer a racial designation. "(http://alchetron.com/Hughie-Lee-Smith-773951-W) Born in Eustis, Florida in 1915 to parents who divorced soon after his birth, Hughie Lee-Smith (who added the hyphen to his name as a teenager to give it more artistic panache) spent his early years in Atlanta, GA under the care of his maternal grandmother... who lived a middle-class lifestyle with its attendant values of respectability and education, which she strove to impart to her grandson. She exerted considerable control over his friendships and leisure activities, forbidding him to participate in forms of mass entertainment because they were “low-class and iniquitous.” Her prohibition against carnivals and county fairs (and the people who went to them) added to a sense of alienation that Lee-Smith felt throughout his life, and that he attributed to the estrangement of the artist—who observes the world from a distance—and to living in a country that often rejected African Americans from the national imaginary through caricature, discrimination, and violence. The fairground’s promise of delight and inclusion haunts Lee-Smith’s paintings... (http://www.michaelrosenfeldart.com/exhibitions/hughie-lee-smith-the-1950s) ...American painter whose paintings shifted from urban settings, to beaches and often featured isolated figures undefined

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